Fears You Never Knew You Had

The wedding is in exactly 24 days now. And our fur baby Whiskey has lost the use of her hind legs overnight.

It’s one thing, to just get into your routine and go to bed at night with three happy and healthy dogs, to wake up in the morning and all of a sudden your whole world crumbles beneath your feet. You watch as your oldest baby struggles off of the bed with no coordination in her back legs whatsoever. A 3 year old mixed rescue dog should not just all of a sudden lose her ability to walk within 12 hours or less. You just stare, you have no words for what just happened, no inclination that this would ever happen, and no warning signals. You hope that throughout the day the problem will just go away on its own, because hey maybe she just slept on them wrong.

But then when you come home from work and nothing has changed and your poor baby is limping and barely keeping her rear end up, you know that you have to take her in. A multitude of things could be happening to her, your given all these different theories but with no concise answers, because of course these things don’t just happen over night. Well I’m sorry doc but this did. All of her vitals are normal, she’s completely healthy, but she is losing functioning in her hind legs.

Something is said about a disconnect from the brain to the spinal cord, but she shows no signs of pain for that to be accurate. Something about meningitis, but no proof in her blood work it’s there. Something about minor seizures, but again no proof of that existence. Something about epilepsy is mentioned, then ticks, but the results say no.

In these 24 days left up until the wedding, you’re supposed to be stress-free and relaxed, getting the final details situated. But here I am, thinking the worst for my first fur baby, on the third days round of pills and medications for a problem that came out of nowhere with no evidence to the cause. You turn to Google and find that this has happened before, apparently in the case of thousands, with each outcome different than the last. You constantly watch for signs, check her up and down for a tick that might have latched on, try to treat her the same and not as different from what she was just three days ago. She cannot do stairs, she can no longer sleep on the bed, she cannot play with her brother and sister, and she cannot tell us what’s wrong.

You’re completely helpless, and something you never thought would ever happen, happens. You fear that she will go completely paralyzed, that whatever is attacking her will not be found in time. The worst fears are the fears of your own reality, and all you can do is take it by day, hoping that the medications work, hoping that she gets through this, and wishing this was not a reality, but a horrible nightmare that you can just wake up from.